FERN BRITTON on chat shows, slimming and her fab fifties

Fern Britton is keen to stress that she “wasn’t always fat”. Britain’s most famous gastric-band patient still finds the media’s obsession with her weight baffling.

“People assume you were fat all your life but I wasn’t. It was only when I had the children,” she says.

Now a svelte size 12 and preparing to cycle 1,000 miles from John o’Groats to Land’s End to help end miscarriage, Fern appears a different woman to the one who was “papped” in her black bikini in 2005.

She may be several stone lighter but insists she hasn’t changed on the inside.

“I’m absolutely the same. People can print photographs of me with no make-up on or looking terrible, but it really doesn’t bother me.”

People can print photographs of me with no make-up on or looking terrible, but it really doesn’t bother me

Fern Britton

“That” beach holiday is only a sore point because it brought to an end a decade of idyllic caravan holidays on the Cornish coast.

The 57-year-old mother of four recalls: “We had all our summers there and then one day the newspapers found us. The people on the caravan site were extremely kind and very protective of us for 10 years but once our idyll was in the press we had to leave.”

After that, Fern and her husband, TV chef Phil Vickery, 53, decided to buy a little house and now divide their time between Cornwall and Buckinghamshire.

Little wonder, then, that the presenter’s fifth book, A Good Catch, is set in Cornwall, as were her three previous bestselling novels.

Writing came almost by accident to Fern. It followed the huge success of her 2008 autobiography, which spent 12 weeks in the top 10. In it, she revealed she was raped at the age of 21 and wrote about the break-up of her first marriage to TV executive Clive Jones, father of her 21-year-old twin boys Jack and Harry and her daughter Grace, 17. Fern also has a 13-year-old daughter, Winnie, with Vickery.

She also discussed the furore surrounding her 2006 gastric bypass surgery, when the Ryvita ad star was accused of misleading the public about her weight loss by claiming it was down to diet and exercise.

Fern has conceded that not being up front about the operation was a “lie by omission” but insists she only kept quiet to protect her privacy.

“What hurt me, if anything hurt me, was women writers writing horrible stuff,” she reflects. “Normal people, the public were so supportive and kind and sweet and I had the most incredible letters, literally thousands, which kept me buoyed up.”

GETTY

Fern with her 2012 Strictly dance partner Artem Chigvintsev

Fans still write to Fern saying they cannot admit to having a gastric band because of the way she was treated.

“I read these letters and I think ‘that’s not on’. Even the medical world agree it’s a beneficial operation.”

Writing has proved therapeutic, not least because it gives Fern the chance to settle a few scores. “Of course, the characters are based on people I know,” she admits. Her next book, which she needs to finish by October (not a problem for someone used out churning out 2,000 words a day), is going to be her most personal yet.

“Some people need a kick up the bum. If they read it, they’ll know who they are. It’s about exorcising the odd demon,” she giggles.

Whether she’s referring to her former This Morning co-star Phillip Schofield, with whom she reportedly fell out (although both claim they’re still friends), we’ll never know. Her former agent Jon Roseman seems a more possible target after his own 2010 warts-and-all autobiography revealed Fern “became increasingly irritated” with Schofield’s penchant for taking over during interviews.

Whatever the truth, leaving This Morning in 2009 proved to be “liberating” for Fern. After starring on Strictly three years ago, she has just finished filming Channel 4’s Time Crashers in which she and nine fellow celebrities, including Noel Gallagher’s ex Meg Matthews and Kirstie Alley, are dumped in carefully recreated historical periods and left to fend for themselves. It airs in the summer.

As well as writing bestselling novels and presenting The Big Allotment Challenge, the former newsreader, who began her broadcasting career at Westward Television in 1979, has also been able to reaffirm her journalistic credentials with her highly acclaimed Fern Britton Meets… series.

It was while interviewing Tony Blair that Fern got the former Prime Minister to admit he would still have removed Saddam Hussein from power even if he knew the Iraqi dictator had no weapons of mass destruction.

Revealing he’d been disarmed by the interview, Blair later said, “Even with all my experience, it still indicates I have something to learn about it.”

The late royal correspondent James Whitaker once summed up Fern’s interview technique by telling a politician she was about to quiz: “Don’t worry, mate, you won’t be able to feel the knife going in.”

With Fern Britton Meets... only aired during the four Sundays of Advent in the run-up to Christmas, Fern says she would love a more regular interviewing gig but one that was “not necessarily showbiz and did not have a shiny floor”.

She admits she got it wrong with Fern, her 2009 talk show that proved a surprising flop. “Fern was only ever running for four weeks, through the Easter holidays, so viewing figures were terrible. We got it absolutely wrong and by the time we realised, it was too late.”

Perhaps something a little more cerebral would be better suited to Fern? She’s the daughter of Shakespearean actor Tony Britton and a former deputy head girl of the highly respected Dr Challoner’s High

School, where Amal “Mrs Clooney” Alamuddin was a fellow pupil.

“I would love to do an interview show that was just set in a dark room, two people sitting opposite each other, just talking.”

Fern, who regularly pitches ideas for TV programmes to executives, thinks the current chat show format is the “wrong way round”.

“You get people on because they’ve got something to flog. If they didn’t have anything to flog, the editor wouldn’t want them on the show. They’d say, ‘What are they going to talk about?’ Why not have people on because they’re fascinating?”

Conversational, breezy Fern is far from alpha female, which probably goes a long way to explaining her universal likeability. “I am a feminist but you can do that quietly and powerfully. And I’ve never tried to be anyone else except me.”

It is a mantra that has not only seen Fern survive 35 years in broadcasting but also have the confidence to complete gruelling bike rides across Egypt, India, Cuba, Jordan and Sri Lanka, raising money for the Genesis Research Trust, a mother and baby charity set up by Robert Winston.

May’s challenge is the first Fern has done on home soil and the British public is invited along for the ride.

“Most people do it in eight, nine, 10 days, but we are women of a certain age and this is an adventure for us so we’re taking our time. I said to Robert that we need to do 100km a day rather than 100 miles a day and stop and take a photograph and have a cup of tea and eat a jelly baby. We’ll always have racers at the front who will finish every day with exhaust fumes on their faces.”

Fern, who has suffered from depression in the past, adds: “Cycling is also good for people’s heads.”

Having first taken up cycling “to do something for myself”, Fern says the sport is perfectly suited to her “keep calm and carry on” nature.

“I spend most of my life with my head down, just one foot after another after another after another, until someone says, ‘You can look up for a minute.’ Don’t think about it. Just get on with it. It’s like cycling up a hill: never, ever look up.”

For more information about Fern’s upcoming cycle ride, Challenge57, visit fernbrittonchallenge57.com.A Good Catch by Fern Britton (HarperCollins, £12.99) is out now. To order, see Express Bookshop (expressbookshop.co.uk).